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'Top Chef' Ilan Hall goes downtown with the Gorbals

August 31, 2009 | 1:09
pm

What kind of restaurant name is "The Gorbals"? We'd better let Ilan Hall, Season 2's winner of "Top Chef," explain:

According to the handsome and bespectacled chef, who was born to a Scottish father and an Israeli mother, that would be serving a variety of small plates heavily influenced by his mixed ethnic background -- but without adhering to any rules of tradition or decorum when it comes to their creation. One such dish is a bacon-wrapped matzo ball, which could be the punch line for a joke beginning, "A rabbi and a pig walk into a bar . . . ."